Chilean Patagonia

Chilean Patagonia is made of mountains, glaciers, and sea-level fjords. It has the world’s largest flying bird and odd flightless birds. There are flamingoes and grey zorro foxes that aren’t actually foxes. It’s tectonic plates and salty lakes. It’s guanacos and sheep grazing the grasslands. And pumas amidst it all.

Iconic Patagonia

Patagonia is known for its dramatic granite towers jutting up from the steppe, reflecting in quiet lakes. Since the last century, it has been a backpackers’ dream destination. There is beauty in every direction. This March, I traveled to Torres del Paine National Park at the end of the Earth along an eastern spur of the Andes Mountains.

Getting There

The first leg of the trip took me three hours from my home airport to Los Angeles. From Los Angeles, I took a ten-and-a-half-hour red-eye to Santiago, Chile. After a layover there, I boarded the last plane to fly another three hours south to Puerto Natales, Chile. (Chile is a loooooong country!). The last bit was just a forty-minute ride to the hotel. Twenty hours after I left my house in North Idaho, I am 7325 miles away on the tip of the Southern Hemisphere. I’m running on adrenaline.From everywhere we went over the next six days, I could see the Paine Massif and its iconic trio of towers. Rising almost 10,000 feet from the grassland, they are separated from the mountain range and glaciers, so you can drive (or hike) around them. It’s hard to wrap my head around that topography. There aren’t many places in the world where such grand mountains rise from sea level. For context, the distance from Mt. Everest’s base camp to the summit is “only” 11,430 feet. (Of course, you start at 17,600 feet and need supplemental oxygen).

Promises of what we’ll see in this dramatic landscape.

Except that the ostriches are rheas, the llamas are guanaco, and the armadillo is a hairy armadillo. Our guide was slightly annoyed that the caution signs didn’t depict his South American animals: “None of them are our species except the lion!”

Salty Lakes

Many lakes in and around Torres del Paine National Park are closed systems, fed only by rainwater with no inlet or outlet. This situation allows salt accumulation, resulting in alkaline water. In this unique high pH environment, bacteria precipitate calcium, trapping sediment in layers.

Over thousands of years, white rocks resembling coral, called stromatolites, formed. Stromatolites are some of the oldest living organisms on Earth. The photosynthesis by the bacteria within these “rocks” helped to create our atmosphere 3.5 million years ago. The unique environment required for their formation exists in only a few places worldwide. It’s these salty waters that attract the unexpected Chilean flamingo.

Bones and Scavengers

The only significant scavengers on the Patagonian steppe are raptors who pick the carcasses clean. In the absence of mammal scavengers like hyenas, who eat bones, or canids, who chew and relocate bones, bleached, weathered bits of skeletons accumulate on the landscape. Grasses grow through them, and they develop a beautiful patina.

Andean condors, one of the largest flighted birds in the world, soar on ten-foot wingspans to spy carrion from afar.

Southern crested caracaras, white-throated caracaras, and chimanga caracaras are falcons that both hunt and scavenge the grasslands. The crested caracaras always look like gangsters to me.

Two pairs of black-chested buzzard-eagles engage in aerial territorial displays south of the park. They are squat, stocky hawks (despite buzzard and eagle in their common name, they are neither). They feed primarily on invasive European hares and rabbits.Other birds I’d never seen before…

Guanaco 

These camelid species, related to llamas, are the most common wild animals in the area. As prey animals, they are always on alert with a quizzical face, a soft, bi-lobed prehensile nose/muzzle, and enviable eyelashes framing large, soft, dark eyes.

Their woolly coats have long outer hairs that form a skirt along their comically narrow waists. On their long legs and soft hooves, they can run up to forty miles/hour. These are the puma’s primary prey. Weighing 175-250 pounds, it’s an amazing feat for a 110-pound female lion to bring one down to feed her family.The sheep pastures are fenced to keep the sheep in. Adult guanacos can easily jump these fences. Their calves, called chulengos, cannot. Along the roadways near the small towns, chulengos congregate at the fences.

Their mothers will come back for them, but the chulengos are distressed, pacing the fence lines. Sometimes, pumas will use the fences as a hunting strategy. However, pumas are not tolerated by sheep ranchers. Hunting is illegal, so livestock guardian dogs are used to haze the big cats away.

Pumas

Patagonia pumas have been the stars of films like the recent BBC’s Seven Worlds, One Planet (episode three), and Dynasties, Netflix’s Predator series, and Our Great National Parks. The films document the dramatic lives of females raising cubs. Every film crew following a habituated mountain lion produces kittens growing up with filmmakers as part of their typical scenery. In 1995, it took a National Geographic filmmaker two years to earn the trust of a puma to make his film Puma: Lion of the Andes. Now, anyone with the resources can sit among these regal cats without disturbing them as they go about their daily lives. What a privilege to be accepted as part of nature and watch these cats being cats.

Next up: all about pumas!

Puma: from the Quechua language for “powerful one”

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